10 Ways to Be Who You Are

“10 Ways to Tell A Guy You’re Interested”

That’s the title of an article in a magazine that a girl sitting in-front of me was reading on the bus; I was on my way home from watching The Social Network movie.

Ten ways!?! That sounds exhausting! Why not simplify and do just 1 method of, mmm, I don’t know…

…Say hello, and tell him, “I’m interested!” Done.

“In what?” he might ask, (if he’s one who needs specifics)

And depending on your willingness to be direct, you might respond with “You.”

Contrary to the title of this post, I’m not going to write about how I think people can be who they already are. I will offer, however, some questions worth exploring:

“Are you free to be who you feel you are inside?” Do you need 10, five or maybe 20 different ways to express your complexity of fears and cover-ups? I have spent so much time figuring out how to behave in the manner that would get me what I want, instead of just flat-out asking for it. And worse, I have spent just as much time hiding behind pleasantries and heartless smiles to avoid having to speak the truth of my thoughts and experiences. Recognizing now that many successful people actually have many enemies and slanderers tells me that I haven’t been selfish or bitchy enough. Actually, I didn’t need that recognition to know that, it has been suggested by a few.

“What is your criteria for friendship?”Your criteria, not what a magazine lists as your “shoulds”. I put the word friends in parenthesis because now, being available as online profiles, most of my friendship interactions are happening online in social networks and I’m left wondering a lot, “Who are my friends?” “What does it look like or mean to be a friend?” Because really, just because I want to be someone’s friend and they accept my request online doesn’t mean that they actually will or want to interact with me. The fact that I have over 300 facebook(fb) friends and did zero face-to-face socializing this week is hard proof of that!

Recently I got a friend request from someone who was a friend of a fb-friend and I wasn’t really sure what the point of it was. It was from a male and sadly, I’m largely skeptical of invitations coming from males. I’m not proud of that, but it’s true. Especially when it’s online from someone I haven’t met before. Hopefully if my fb-friends and friends read this, those who are unsure of their friendly relations with me will ask, those who don’t ask, probably weren’t and those who know won’t have to.

“Who would you call if you knew that they would be happy to hear from you?”

“To whom would you say it, if saying no were valued and respected?”

“What would you wear if you were the trend-setter?”

Those are just 5 questions. The second set of 5 (to make it the classic 10) would be the same questions, answered at a time when you feel like you have nothing and nobody to lose.